Colour Supplement

Articles by contemporary writers

Sunday August 27 2006

 

Depression part 6: after 5 months of taking medication

By Gordon Atkinson

 

 

I recently finished my fifth month taking medication for anxiety and depression. I wrote about this a few times during the first month, but after that I’ve avoided the topic for a couple of reasons. First, I didn’t want this to become Real Live Preacher’s depression journal. Second, what do I know about depression this early in the game? It’s not like I’m an expert or anything.

But I would like to revisit the topic at this time and share some beginner’s insights gained from five months of a new perspective.

You see, I never knew that I was depressed. With no perspective other than my own, how could I know what I should be feeling in a given situation? I just thought I was a moody, sometimes lazy, selfish guy who moped a lot. I always managed to find the energy I needed to smile at church and get my work done, but I had no energy to put on the same act for my family. I was pleasant enough at church or if you met me in the supermarket, but at home I was a morose, withdrawn, shadow person.

I figure I lost about a year of my children’s lives. I’m choosing not to dwell on that. What’s done is done. My children still love me, and I love them. My lack of presence has also been hard on my marriage, but Jeanene and I are committed to each other, and we’re working on that as well.

What I have gained over the last five months is a benchmark for my own feelings. I have an idea about how I should feel. I know what my low point is, and I know what my high point is. I have some understanding of how much anxiety and worry a person ought to experience when small problems present themselves. I know what a small amount of stress feels like. It tickles my mind and gets my attention, but it doesn’t cause me to have an anxiety attack and eat, say, an entire box of Poptarts at midnight.

I feel stress and sadness, of course, but they don’t turn into panicked, paranoid delusions. I don’t collapse into despair on Sunday evening because someone frowned during the sermon.

It’s funny, I used to wonder what the deal was with all these depressed people. (I was wondering this right in the middle of my own depression, but let’s talk about denial some other time.) I would wonder why sadness would stop them from carrying on with their daily work. So you’re sad. So what! Just get up off your lazy ass and get some work done. Feed your kids, help with the dishes, go to bed and get up in the morning and do it again. After all, I was managing to get my work done in spite of how I felt. I managed to do that for two and a half years. I managed to keep doing my work even during the last year, when I don’t think I rejoiced or celebrated anything at all. What a joyless, grey existence I had.

So for all of you who wonder why depression stops people from living, I have an answer for you. I have a way for you to think about this so that you can understand it. Here it is:

When it comes to depression, there are no heroes.

Imagine how you feel when something terribly sad happens to you. And think about the anxiety and tingly panic you feel when something you dread is about to happen, and you know you must face it head on. It feels like butterflies in your stomach. Put those two together and imagine that you feel that every day. You have no idea why, but every day you experience both of those feelings to varying degrees.

How long could you keep your happy act going? A week? Two weeks? What if you were a person of deep, moral strength and determination? What if, by some heroic effort, you managed to ignore your feelings and carry on with your life for an entire year before you snapped?

And you will snap. Trust me on this. The day will come when your act falls apart like a house of cards. Your true feelings will come out, and they will come out in crazy ways. The longer you hold them inside, the crazier they are when they finally get out.

Okay, this is the important part. This is why there are no heroes with depression. On the day you snap, you are just a guy who snapped. You get no credit for the weeks or months or years that you were being heroic. No one knew that you were holding all that inside. Sorry buddy, there are no bonus points for being a hero. When you snap and start yelling at your kids for no good reason, you are just a guy who yells at his kids for no good reason.

Of course, you don’t want to be a guy who yells at his kids, so you start avoiding them and everyone else if you can get away with it. You begin to isolate yourself. By the time you get home from a long day of pretending that you care about things, you don’t want to talk to anyone.

Your whole life becomes centred around trying not to feel bad. You will do whatever it takes to get a little relief from despair, anxiety, self-loathing, and all the other horrible things you feel. Hell yes, you’ll do it. You’ll do anything to feel a little better or at least to feel nothing at all.

For me, the only way to stop feeling bad was to lose myself in a movie, or a book, or the computer. So I spent less and less time with my wife and children. I was home, but I really wasn’t home. I knew that they needed me, but I was willing to sacrifice my long-term happiness for short-term relief.

It’s rather like going into debt. Once you are on the way down, why not use the credit card a few more times to give yourself some momentary pleasure. I mean, if you owe $15,000, what’s another hundred bucks?

I managed to avoid falling apart for several years. And then came Real Live Preacher. Writing was the best drug I had ever found. Better than food or movies. Better than a night alone where no one could find me. With writing I could do more than escape. I could feel the joy that I was missing in real life. Perhaps Real Live Preacher was the only place where I felt safe enough to be the real live me.

At the same time, Real Live Preacher was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The rigorous and emotional work of writing finally brought me to the moment of crisis, the moment when I finally broke. Insomnia, migraine headaches, and a facial tick that still plagues me finally convinced me to go to the doctor.

Real Live Preacher was born of my depression, you might say. And sometimes I wonder what the future will bring. I can already tell a difference. I’m not driven by desperation anymore. Writing is becoming a craft that I embrace, instead of an escape that I feed with energy that should be going to my family and friends.

So when someone you know finally caves in and falls apart, remember that you have no idea how long this person carried his secret burden. And I don’t care who you are. You cannot carry unending sorrow and burning anxiety forever.

No one is that strong. And no one can be that heroic.

 

PART SEVEN OF THIS SERIES WILL BE PUBLISHED HERE NEXT WEEK (03/09/06).  TO READ PREVIOUS PARTS PLEASE VISIT THE COLOUR SUPPLEMENT ARCHIVE

Gordon Atkinson is pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in San Antonio, Texas and has his own excellent website www.reallivepreacher.com.  We are most grateful to Gordon for his permission to reproduce his essays here.

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